In a typical enterprise, there are several different data management systems, such as an accounting data management system, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data management system, and an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) data management system. Each of these data management systems can have different data sources, where each of the data sources may include common data stored in a different format. As required, a data management system can be integrated with another data management system in various types of data-integration projects, for example, application integration, legacy migration, data source consolidation, master data consolidation, server consolidation, or other Information Technology (IT) initiatives. All these data-integration projects have their own set of software solutions designed to automate the corresponding data-integration. A software solution may be, for example, Data Warehousing (DW), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), or Extract, Transform, Load (ETL).
Although the scope of data-integration projects can be different, all data-integration projects start by data mapping, which is the process of integrating and organizing data from disparate data management systems into a single platform for manipulation and evaluation. Data mapping facilitates availability of data of one data management system to other data management systems in an enterprise. As data is distributed and is stored in different formats across the several data management systems, inter-relations are not always explicitly available or readily determined. Therefore, data-integration projects require that data stored in one data management system be mapped to data stored in other data management systems.
While efforts to automate data mapping have been undertaken, in conventional methods of data-integration, the task of data mapping is still performed manually. Manual data mapping is very time-consuming and prone to human errors. The reliance on manual labor also increases the cost of such data-integration projects.
In light of the foregoing discussion, there is a need for a method and a system to automate the task of data mapping.